The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your [...]

What happens at the lab when the managers and the MBAs go to an international meeting and leave the labrats in charge of themselves:

Can we get an Amen?

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True Story: Last week, I was standing in front of a halal grease wagon in Philadelphia waiting for my baba ganouj, when some African American dude selling a book started chatting me up. Much eye rolling ensued but he was actually kinda of interesting and I had some time to kill. I wasn’t interested in buying his book because I told him I was out of work and trying to save money (yeah, yeah, I should have brought my lunch but I had a yen for roasted eggplant. So sue me.) He asked me what I did and I told him I was a drug designer of oncology drugs. Oooo, he said, does that mean your companies have figured out the cures for cancer and are just sitting on them? I hear this kind of uninformed opinion all of the time, that the pharmas are sitting on some big cancer cure and they’re holding out in order to, um, to, well, hell, I don’t know. This accusation never did make any damn sense to me. If the pharmas had THE definitive cures for cancer, they’d be screaming and jumping up and down at the FDA to approve them right away. Cancer is big business and there’s a lot of potential extortion money to be made. People who are frantic to survive to see their kids grow up will pay just about anything for a cure.

Sadly, there is no cure for cancer yet, mostly because cancer is not just one disease but many diseases. You would think that with all of the work that is left to do to cure cancer and all of the discoveries that we are making in cell biology in the past decade that every scientist in the world would be overwhelmed with work instead of getting laid off and scraping together a meager existence. But the truth is that those of us who should be working round the clock to do protein expression, structural biology, genomics and medicinal chemistry are falling out of the middle class and into the realm of a precariat existence while cancer goes uncured and the amount of resources thrown at is is parsed into “need to know” CRO operations in foreign countries.

So, when I saw Derek Lowe’s morning post on the hope of curing cancer, I got a little wistful. Derek ends his post:

But I’m operating on a different time scale from Eschenbach. Here he is in 2006, in The Lancet:

“Think of it”, von Eschenbach says, “for thousands of years we have dealt with cancer working only with what we could see with our eyes and feel with our fingers, then for a 100 years we’ve dealt with cancer with what we could see under a microscope. Now, we have gone in 10 years to a completely different level.” This new science “is going to change how we think, it’s going to change how we approach things; it’s going to change everything.”

. . .He points to the example of testicular cancer. The development of treatments for this cancer was a great success, von Eschenbach says, but one that “took decades of trial and error, one trial after another, after another, after another”. That hit-and-miss approach is no longer necessary, von Eschenbach says. Now, if 10% of patients responded to a treatment, he says, “you take the tools of genomics and go back, reverse engineer it, and ask: what was different about that 10%? Well, they had an EGF [epidermal growth factor] receptor mutation, ah ha!”

Ah ha, indeed. Here’s more in a similar vein. The thing is, I don’t disagree with this in principle. I disagree on the scale. No one, I think, knows how to eliminate deaths from cancer other than the way we’re doing it now: detailed investigation of all sorts of cancers, all sorts of cellular pathways, and all sorts of therapies directed at them. Which is all a lot of work, and takes a lot of time (and a lot of money, too, of course). It also leads to a huge array of dead ends, disappointments, and a seemingly endless supply of “Hmm, that was more complicated than we thought” moments. I don’t see that changing any time soon. I’m optimistic enough to think that there is a bottom to this ocean, that it’s of finite size and everything in it is, in principle, comprehensible. But it’s big. It’s really, really big.

There are people who defend goal statements like Eschenbach’s. Such things force us to aim high, they say, they focus attention on the problem and give us a sense of urgency. Taken too far, though, this point of view leads to the fallacy that what’s important is to care a lot – or perhaps to be seen to care a lot. But the physical world doesn’t care if we care. It yields up its secrets to those who are smart and persistent, not to the people with the best slogans.

Or the best MBAs that money can buy. I guess the pharmas really are sitting on a cure.

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Speaking of Amens, our poll shows that an awful lot of us (about 76%) are heathens with a naturalistic worldview.

Alright! {{high fives}}

Oh, sorry about that, believers. We’ll try to be nice.

If you haven’t had a chance to declare your godlessness or semi-godlessness, as it turns out, check it out here.

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Sounds like it was “Rick Santorum has cooties” night at the Republican playground debate last night. I didn’t know that Romney supported Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey. I like the end of this article for its “I know you are but what am I?” flavor:

Mr. Romney, who has struggled to win the trust of party activists, is under intense pressure to prove his conservative bona fides. He was asked about a recent statement that he was “severely conservative” when he was governor. He defined his meaning as “strict,” saying he empowered state police to enforce immigration laws, pushed English language immersion programs and “stood up and said I would stand on the side of life.”

Mr. Paul, in response to a question about the biggest misconception about him, complained about the perception that he could not win against Mr. Obama in the general election, pointing to a recent poll that showed him closer to the president than the other candidates.

When Mr. Romney was asked to describe a misconception about him, he demurred, borrowing from Mr. Gingrich’s debate-the-moderator playbook and saying sharply, “You know, you get to ask the questions you want; I get to give the answers I want.”

Oooo, I think the debate game has run its course (about 15 debates ago) and everyone is getting a little testy. For Pete’s sake, can we just have Romney appoint Santorum as his VP running mate and get on with it already?

I have been predicting to co-workers and etc. that IF . . ! . . . we even get any major snow at ALL . . . it will happen in March and/or April. (Major is 6″ or more in a single snow-event).

So western Michigan has had 7+ inches of snow in the last 2 days and we have had way less. So I have only been wrong by a week, heh heh. My thinking is, is that as the sun rises in the sky with the advancing season it will boil more water up offa the Gulfa Mexico. If big soggy air masses head inland and happen to meet cold dry ArctiCanadian air masses coming south, they will have a lot of water they can drop as snow. The midwest and plains semi-often get spring blizzards.

You don’t have to stay. You are not entitled to special treatment because you are catholic.
Allow me to clarify: Technically, *I’m* Catholic. But I have many close relatives who are evangelical fundamentalists and they don’t think Catholics or any other Christian sect has the right religion. To them, Catholics are in a false religion and the pope is both fallible and corrupt. Liberal christians are childish and stupid to fundies. And ALL of us need to be converted to the most narrow minded, judgmental and authoritarian form of apocalyptic Christianity or we’re all going to Hell. Especially Catholics. I didn’t invent this and right now, I don’t have a dog in this fight, I’m a panentheist with no church affiliation. I just think it’s funny that the evangelical fundies are getting the same treatment from their hero Santorum that they meet out to everyone else on a daily basis. Rick thinks that Protestants are in a false religion and he doesn’t have much respect for them. The fundies are going to think that if he’s elected, we’ll all have to convert to Catholicism, which, given the way Santorum talks is probably not too far off the mark. We’re certainly going to have to live like Catholics. Fundies were ok with forcing everyone to live like fundies. But kissing rings and kowtowing to the Vatican? It would be like the 16th century in Europe all over again.
But in any case, I don’t have to respect anyone’s personal beliefs. I don’t have to put them on a level higher than mine. That might come as a shock to you but I advise you to get used to it. There are a lot more non-believers than you realize and we’re tired of being pushed around, dismissed and patronized by people who feel they have the god given right to lord it over the rest of us. It’s like, all religions are equal but some religions are more equal than others and we say, bullshit. Nobody’s in this country is entitled to more rights or respect than anyone else because of what form of worship of a supernatural and invisible being they subscribe to. I have to behave as a good citizen to YOU and not deny you your civil rights. In fact, as a school board official in the 90s, I was one of the more sympathetic board members when it came to religion, always trying to accommodate them in a way that would respect the church-state principal. Sometimes, the district interfered with the rights of the religious. Yes, it occasionally happens. And I thought it was unfair. Plus, it was a good way to keep them from trying to get their claws into the science classes, for example, if they had little reason to be upset about values education if they were fundies, or no private place for to pray during the day if they were muslims. (Yes, we do have to accommodate muslim obligations to pray in school) But I don’t have to put you on a pedestal and consider you a more spiritually mature person because you’re Catholic because I don’t put any value on spirituality. So there.
On this blog, there are no sacred cows and there are no religions, not even my own, that are off limits. And when religions insist that everyone follow their non-secular rules because of some 4th century philosopher’s opinion of original sin or some Bronze Age scribe’s opinion of women, sex and patriarchy, it is my right and obligation to point out how damaging and unnecessary it is to apply those rules to groups of people who do not share those beliefs or rules.
You can get all pissy about it if you want. The blogosphere is a big place. You might feel more comfortable at a Catholic blog. Er, I’d advise you to stay away from evangelical fundy blogs though. They’re worse than we are.

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Readers, I’m sorry I missed Water Cooler Monday. Perhaps it would be simplest to say I was trapped in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. TPP Lori Wallach on the leaked investment chapter [Eyes on Trade (PDF)]. The tribunals would be empowered to order payment of unlimited government funds to foreign investors over […] […]

Body: This paper, or pre-draft, or sketch, or whatever it is, started out with this title: "With The 12-Point Platform, this won't happen: An aristocracy of credentialism in the 20%." But then I realized I'd gotten in deeper than I thought -- one of those posts were the framework and the notes overwhelm the original idea -- and as it tur […]